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Viola Desmond reminds us that while you may not taste victory, the fight is still worthy: Keenan

“Pick your battles.” You hear it all the time, if you are a person at all inclined to try to change things in your world or the world around you — at work, during family and friendship conflicts, in politics. “Pick your battles. I mean, think about it, is this the hill you want to die on? Is this the place you want to set up the barricades — this, this small thing we’re talking about?”

It’s advice I’ve given, and taken, at times. Weighing the decision about whether whatever small injustice or offence you’re faced with is worth raising a fuss about, or whether this is one of those times to go along to get along (keeping your eyes on the prize, not sweating the small stuff, and so on through the list of self-help clichés).

But it’s been on my mind, this idea of picking your battles, since the announcement Dec. 8 that Viola Desmond would appear on the $10 bill. I’ve been wondering how much she must have heard some variation of it during the events that brought her into the public eye, the ones that have now made her worthy of commemoration.

When it was announced that Desmond would be the first non-Royal woman to have her face on the front of a bill — and would be the first black Canadian on the money, too — one of the great things about the announcement was that many of us got to learn about the story of her life for the first time and marvel at her courage and determination.

As the Star’s Tim Harper wrote this spring in supporting her for the honour, she was born into a segregated Nova Scotia during the First World War and had to train as a beautician in Montreal and the United States because no local beauty school would take a black student. Still, she returned home and ran a beauty school, building a successful business training black women from across Eastern Canada and founding her own line of hair and makeup products. Then in 1946 she ran into car trouble during a business trip to New Glasgow, N.S., and went to a movie theatre to kill time.

“The Roseland was a segregated theatre. Desmond may or may not have known that. Historians aren’t sure,” Harper wrote. “She merely wanted to sit downstairs because she had vision problems and would see the movie better from that vantage point. When the manager and the ticket agent told her blacks had to sit in the balcony, Desmond refused to move from her downstairs seat.”

“Police arrived and physically dragged her from the theatre, injuring her in the process. She was thrown in jail overnight, given the choice of paying a $20 fine or spending 30 days in jail. Ultimately, she was convicted of defrauding the province of one penny of its amusement tax, the difference in price between sitting downstairs and upstairs.”

She fought the case all the way to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, where her appeal was denied even as the judge wondered aloud if the theatre manager was actually in a “surreptitious endeavour to enforce a Jim Crow rule by misuse of a public state.” She died in 1965 at age 50, her courage and unjust persecution publicly unacknowledged. Yet her case is cited as having galvanized public opinion in outrage against racial segregation in Nova Scotia, helping lead eventually to legislative changes. She was pardoned posthumously in 2010, and a public holiday in Nova Scotia was named in her honour. And now, she will appear on currency notes across Canada.

On hearing the details of her life, I thought about this constant advice, “pick your battles.” I wondered how often she must have heard it during her legal struggle — and indeed, Historica Canada records that her husband had counselled her to give up the fight and “Take it to the Lord with a prayer.” Here was a black woman who’d lived her life in a racist society, so segregated that she needed to travel abroad to be educated and took that as an opportunity to create the local school she’d been unable to find.

After a life of dignified success in the face of contempt from her society, who would have advised her to pick this particular battle, over a movie ticket, a downstairs seat instead of one in the balcony? One can only guess, but like Rosa Parks a decade later in the United States, it seems likely she was tired. “Tired of giving in,” as Parks put it, to a society that constantly asked her to retreat and concede and accept less.

Desmond’s sister told the Globe and Mail recently that Viola had said, “I’m not the person to go around and be an activist for something,” that she only wanted to run her business and teach black women to run theirs in the same way. She didn’t want to pick this battle, or any battle, in other words.

But in the course of trying to live her life in dignity, the world constantly picked battles for her, forcing on her the constant necessity to surrender or retreat. Or, in this case, at last, to resist.

It is for that act of resistance, a simple, defiant insistence on fairness and dignity in the face of pervasive, inescapable racism that we celebrate her now.

But it’s also worth remembering the whole of her story — that she was made to suffer for her courage and died not honoured as a hero who stood up to injustice, but branded as a convicted criminal.

We’d prefer to pick our battles, but sometimes they follow us everywhere, and our only choice is when to say enough’s enough. Sometimes what will later be recognized as courage is branded petulance and fraudulence. Sometimes vindication and victory don’t come in time for us to feel their relief.

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